Cholodenko's "All Right"

I finally saw The Kids Are All Right. (Yep. This is a Netflix household.) And I know I was supposed to hate it. But--guess what?--I didn't.

I had expected something slick, and this film is not. The main thing that got me was its texture of unrelieved discomfort. Writer-director Lisa Cholodenko, co-writer Stuart Blumberg and the cast do discomfort really, really well. So well and so thoroughly, in fact, that discomfort starts from moment one and never lets up even through to the sober ending. The film is brilliant in that way, an absolute encyclopedia of discomfort and one so irritatingly uncomfortable that it not only documents every variety of unease in its characters but reaches out from that screen and uncovers much of the unease in its viewers, too.

I'm going to confess to being uncomfortable with The Kids Are All Right because some personal buttons were pushed with alarming accuracy. But that only made me respect this film more.

First off, I want to get the class issue, which some disapproving viewers have focused on, out of the way. If I see a movie that deals honestly with the lives of real, working class lesbians--or other under-represented people--hooray for that. But I don't expect to see that very often in this commercial climate, and I'd be missing a lot if I were to limit myself to art that faithfully documents the lives of the under-represented.

The bigger political boogaboo about The Kids Are All Right is its central, catalytic dilemma. Jules (Julianne Moore), a fledgling landscape designer in a supposedly settled, affluent household (breadwinning obstetrician wife, two teens) and Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a restauranteur and the lesbian couple's anonymous sperm donor, recently contacted by the curious kids, end up having a wild, secret affair. There has been flack, too, about the depiction and treatment of a Latino laborer Jules hires to help with her first design job, but these passages smartly reveal Jules's roiling insecurity and impulsiveness. Again, it's about profound discomfort enacted by the players and observed and felt by the audience. Moore's attitudes and actions should be seen as a sharp statement about the external consequences of internal rootlessness and upheaval.

Annette Bening--as Nic, Jules's partner--absolutely owns her role, physically, emotionally, psychologically. Her critical, controlling, hyperviligant tendencies--again, insecurity, discomfort, overcompensation--make her a tough character to warm up to. But, like her or not, you do come to sympathize with her. You feel her heart. She's real. There's a major turning point I won't reveal here--just in case any of you haven't gotten your Netflix DVD yet--but Bening's meticulous expressiveness suddenly goes from simply great to simply stunning. Her through-the-fire performance is a through-line delivering you to the film's resolution. It's a hero's journey.

In the beginning, it's tempting to type Ruffalo's free-spirited Paul as a Dionysian stud who only follows his senses. Yet his heart, too, is every bit as much on display in Ruffalo's acting and his responsive, self-revealing interactions with each of the other characters. Is it possible to be human and not wish this man well, even if you end up wishing him away from this particular family?

The "kids," especially Mia Wasikowska as college-bound Joni, turn in credible jobs in their roles--natural in tone and winning. The kids are all right, indeed.

I had a harder time appreciating Moore's work in this film. She appears, in every moment, to be physically straining at her job of Looking Like A Lesbian. This bizarre awkwardness could work for the character. After all, Jules's sexual orientation--like the exact legal status of the couple's "marriage," as they choose to call it--is a lingering question mark. Jules is a woman in flux in any number of ways. But Moore's embodiment of Jules is severely alienating, and I suspect that this undermines the potential empathy of most lesbian viewers. It doesn't help that Jules betrays Nic. For many lesbians, Jules's fling with Paul becomes, simply, a betrayal of lesbian politics--something that straight, mainstream audiences should not witness. Worse, it becomes a betrayal of women who remember losing lovers to men.

Weirdly though, Moore's weirdness as Jules forms a significant part of the film's texture of discomfort, that discomfort you can never escape.

There's an early scene where Jules attempts to go down on Nic (under cover of a comforter, ironically) while Nic watches a gay male porn flick. (Uh-uh! Lesbians enjoying the sight of men having sex? WTF???) When their 15-year-old son Laser (Josh Hutcherson) discovers the tape, Jules takes it upon herself--Nic being too embarrassed--to explain the inconvenient truth that sexuality and desire are not fixed states but are fluid and often complicated. Of course, Jules being Jules, her earnest defense of the couple's taste in entertainment is ham-handed and ineffective.

You sense in Jules, as in Moore, someone who's trying a little too hard, probably because Nic--in her own way, another striver--always seems to demand so much. You know Jules expects to fail. Her affair with Paul looks like a desperate jailbreak out of a life of always trying to do the right thing and duck criticism. But that's all it ever looks like. For Paul, on the other hand, it comes to be a liberation of a different, lovelier kind.

Film artists have given us countless critiques of the American family. This film builds on that tradition, expanding the notion of what an American family can be but without romanticizing or politicizing it. Its characters--not perfect people, not impeccable role models in any sense--reflect believable, recognizable psychic and emotional issues and work through crisis in ways that provide classic drama. Cholodenko and Blumberg remarkably sustain their vision through to the end. And if Annette Bening snares an Oscar, I'll be smiling.